Even so, it gets great reviews within a circle of Marxist academics such as Eric Foner, leftist rockers such as Rage Against the Machine, and actors such as Matt Damon, who in Good Will Hunting tells his psychiatrist that A People’s History will "knock you on your a--."

For Howard Zinn, America was evil and capitalism bad -- except for his lucrative publishing deal, and prestigious professorship at Boston University. Zinn was pretty quiet about the Soviet Union and what he might have done during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but Mao Tse-Tung's China was the closest thing to a "people's government."